Shirley Cheung

The portrait of Shirley Cheung is one of Andrea G. Artz's mokuhanga renderings of a photographic sitting, transferred through hand-carved blocks and printed on washi using water-based pigments and a baren. Composition in this series tends to be tight: the head fills most of the sheet, framed by a shallow neutral ground that draws attention to the modeling of the face. Each color pass is registered with kento marks cut into the block edges, and the flesh is built from layered impressions rather than a single tone, with bokashi gradients used where shadow turns under the cheekbone or jaw. The sheet thus holds two temporalities — the camera's instant and the block's slow accumulation. Artz's practice as a whole moves between flat print and three-dimensional folded form, and these portraits supply the source imagery for her sculptural paper figures. As an independent print, the Cheung portrait reads as a self-contained study in how mokuhanga can absorb and re-time a contemporary photographic portrait.